Key Terminologies

• Lexis: vocabulary of a language

• Deixis: words that denote upon the indication to something, or a context of language that would only be fully known by a comfortable speaker of the language e.g. ‘have you been here long?’

• Grammar: system/rules of a language

• Phonology: sounds of pronunciation of a language

• Prosodic features: common features of language like stress, intonation etc e.g. oh yes

• Non-fluency features: signs of non-fluency like sentence fillers e.g. ‘er’, (pause) , ‘um’

• paralinguistic features: non-verbal parts of conversation e.g. facial expressions, gestures

• Pragmatics: how context in conversation etc is contributing to its meaning e.g. ‘i have an early morning’-mornings are early, the context is ‘i am waking up early’

• Virtuous errors: errors children make, often due to their limited understanding of grammatical rules e.g. ‘sheeps’

• Metalinguistic awareness: the ability to think and show awareness of language itself

• inflectional morphemes: ‘s’ for plural, ‘ed’ for past are examples

Key Features of stages in CLA (Child Language Acquisition)

0-2 months

• reflexive crying

• vegetative sounds

4-6 months

• auditory discrimination

• social cognition

• memory development

• oral and motor control

• articulatory and muscle coordination

• odd proto-word

6-9 months

• joint attention

• object permanence

• oral motor control

• canonical babbling: vowel + consonant

• fine motor skills

9-12 months

• variegated babbling

• reduplicated babbling

• gestural communication

CDS (Child Directed Speech) from caregivers for 0-12 months

• turn-taking

• exaggerated intonation and mouth movements

• reduplications

• repeated sentence frames

• simple lexis

• higher pitch

• slower tempo

• repetition

• emphasis on key words

• mirroring sounds and acknowledgement of speech

• tag questions

Main key stages of CLA

Holophrastic Stage

1-2 years

Also known as the ‘two-word stage’, children at this stage will show characteristics of:

• rapid lexis acquisition

• basic syntax development

• omissions and substitutions

• receptive language

• expressive language

They will also learn larger variety of consonant sounds, plosives and nasal sounds. Their understanding is typically better than their transmission and they struggle with phonemes which involve consonant clusters, such as ‘sk’, ‘tr’ ‘sp’ etc and also with the liquid phonemes of ‘l’ and ‘r’. They are capable of some personal interaction and use of some nouns and adjectives. They will also show signs of telegraphic speech, 50 words will be their ‘working lexis’.

Common features of CDS at holophrastic stage

• simple language

• exaggerated intonation

• clear pronunciation

• grammatically simple sentences

• repetition, especially of key words

Telegraphic stage

2-3 years

Known as the ‘vocabulary spurt phase’, this is when children learn 200-1000 words to add into their knowledge of lexis and will transmit greater meaning in their words. They will also learn 3-word combinations and will make some of the following errors:

• fronting: the sounds pronounced from the back are done at the front e.g. ‘tat’ instead of ‘cat’

• stopping: to use a stop consonant rather than fricative(consonant caused by turbulent airflow) e.g. ‘sip’ rather than ‘tip’

• cluster reduction: reduce consonant clusters e.g. ‘pane’ instead of ‘plane’

• overextension: to use one word for all of something e.g. ‘daddy’ for all men

• underextension: to use a word only for one thing e.g. ‘shoes’ for only the child’s own pair of shoes

They will also often give a running commentary of what they are doing and will begin imaginative play. The more they interact with adults, the more they will be developed in this aspect. They will still struggle with prepositions such as ‘to’, ‘from’, ‘is’ etc.

Common features of CDS at Telegraphic stage

• exaggerated intonation

• repetition

• simplified syntax

• clear pronunciation

They will also introduce these aspects of CDS:

• expansion: repeating a child’s utterances and remodelling them into new sentences, sometimes as questions e.g. ‘i eat apple’ to ‘did you eat apple?’

• recasting: rephrasing a child’s utterances correctly e.g. ‘i eat apple’ to ‘you ate an apple?’

• labeling: pointing out objects e.g. ‘look, an apple!’

• interactive dialogue: consists of engaging speech, more often than not questions e.g. ‘did you eat an apple? what color was it? was it delicious?’

Post-Telegraphic stage

3-5 years

At this stage, children will undergo morphological and syntactic development. In pragmatics, they will learn:

• turn taking

• adjustment of speech based on the listener

• indirect speech and politeness

Some developments in vocabulary may include:

• increase in vocabulary

• learning the use of idioms

• synonyms and antonyms

Some developments in phonology may include:

• Clearer pronunciation, more consistent

• ability to distinguish between similar sounding sounds

Oher developments may include:

• connecting words

• number words

• emotion-related words

• family terms

• colours

• contrasting concepts e.g. big and small

• hypernyms: categorical things e.g. animals, colours

• hyponyms: things within those categories e.g. frog, yellow

This is also typically the age when they begin to go to school so will have a wider social network and will learn longer words. They can generally converse effortlessly and use the conditional tense. They will learn to use non-essential lexis and articulate complex sentence structures, as well as the use of auxiliary and modal verbs.

CDS for post-telegraphic stage

• diminutive forms: adding vowels to the end of words to attract attention e.g. dog’ to ‘doggie’

• repetition

• rephrasing using expansion or recasting

• exaggerated intonation

• frequent questions

• an occasional discussion of concrete (not abstract!) topics

5-8 years mostly developed

At this stage, children will have begun learning to read and write due to school and the teacher will play a major role in their language acquisition. They will learn to use figurative and imaginative language, to be good at giving requests, ideas and will attain lexis amounting to 1000s of words. They will learn humour, play of words, language to argue with and at the climax of learning, code-switching, which relates to elaborated and restricted code.

Note: refer to flashcards for more on code and theories for CLA.

CDS for 5-8 year olds

• increased complexity

• discussion of abstract concepts

• encouragement of independence

• expand on topics already known/introduce new ones

• teach pragmatics and politeness e.g. ‘what do you say?’ (to having been given something)

However, the guardians of the child will not impact their speech as greatly as before, as school will play a major role in this, and as mentioned before, teachers will play the caregiver role. Peers will also impact their demeanour around different social settings.